(Editor’s note: The Rev. Canon Albert Ogle is en route to a UNAIDS meeting in Geneva where the difficulties of proving prevention and health services to men who have sex with men (MSM) will be the focus of the two-day consultation. Given that he criminalization of homosexuality in 76 countries makes it so much more difficult to reach and support these vulnerable populations, he describes how the work is being hampered in Zambia by religious zealots who have targeted one of the leading HIV activists there.)

Not many of us know who invented the word “homophobia” even though we use it every day. Dr. George Weinberg first mentioned the word in the 1960s in one of his groundbreaking books, “Society and the Healthy Homosexual.” He was interviewed in 1998 in New York and gave the background to his creation of this word.

Thirty years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine the excitement and attention around the U.S. Supreme Court’s review of same gender marriages when some clergy were (illegally) blessing unions, marrying and doing all kinds of imaginative house blessings for gay and lesbian couples.

Recent events at the Vatican reminds me of a visit to St Peter’s Basilica with my partner Frank Wilson. He was an English art historian and took me to Italy for the first time as a newly ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Ireland.

We were barely 25 years old and madly in love. I had to be closeted n my parish on the edge of Roman Catholic West Belfast, not as a Roman sympathizer (though that was well rumored in my staunchly Protestant parish), but as a gay man. It was still illegal to be gay in Northern Ireland then.